Osborne
had looked at contemporary documents on the case of socialist lecturer
George Holyoake (Jamie Muscato), the last person jailed in 1842 for
blasphemy in England and, from them, fashioned this play. This is no The Crucible, but deliberately so. It
is a carefully measured series of snapshot scenes from days leading up
and during the trial and imprisonment of Holyoake.

As
presented in the play, Holyoake is a self-educated man, carefully
spoken but a stammerer, who was somewhat uneasily linked with reformer Robert Owen.
He is poorly renumerated for his pains giving lectures travelling from
parish to parish. His starving wife (Caroline Moroney) and child, like many others caught up in the upheaval of the industrial revolution, are on the poverty line and have to lodge with her sister.

Holyoake doggedly pursues his lecture schedule including a talk in Cheltenham on "Home Colonization, Emigration and the Poor Law" where he is ambushed by a question on man's duty to God from the audience, a ready-made story for the local press, although Holyoake, an atheist, is reluctant to touch on any matter related to religion.

This is a sweetly-short hour-long play intelligently and fluently directed by Jimmy Walters with an equally ingeniously simple set of wooden benches and stone walls from designer Philip Lindley matching the fluid staging and scene changes (choreographer Ste Clough).

Osborne's script also manages to allay possible accusations of a chattering classes' play on a working-class story by a careful structure with a modern-day lawyer narrator (Doron Davidson) giving "information" and by the end, a touch of irony.

In the play we see a dramatically satisfying predicament of a man who can find no way out but to answer with logic and coherence. A man who discovers himself abandoned to magistrate (Richard Shanks) and jury, with local newspaper printer and journalist in tow, determined to maintain the power of the church and parish.

It is also curiously satisfying to complete the jigsaw with our own research, the main pieces already put in place by the play. Something which, even before geeks at the Rand Corporation began experimenting with the internet, was maybe the aim of the playwright.

But as has been noted on our blog several times, the playwriting world itself was still subject to the Lord Chamberlain's edict. And the welfare state (as Elvis Costello noted in the lyrics of Let Him Dangle) did not extend to abolition of the death penalty. So this combination of canny popularism, political activism and the ability to pique our curiosity makes for a fulfilling hour.

In an age where our state institutions are increasingly fragmented seemingly on a local basis, many would say creating a commercial maze with a loss of accountability, the deceptively straightforward and artful structure of this play encapsulates a tangle of still relevant issues Even perhaps a ready-made historical subject for Ken Loach? A green light for a short play with a long reach.

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Mere colour-coded opinions here & on Twitter @TLTreviews
Follow Theatregoer's Highway Code - red for 'stay at home'; amber for 'may cater for some tastes'; and green for 'go! go! go!'; Usually all reviews are posted the day after our theatre trip! Alongside TLT and her little hatchback, aka Alice Josephs, journalists Francis Beckett http://www.francisbeckett.co.uk/, Peter Barker and Tim Gopsill also take the steering wheel at times as esteemed guest reviewers! If you feel the need to make me take my eyes off the blog while I'm driving, email me on trafficlightblog@yahoo.co.uk ...